MUSA QALA, Afghanistan — U.S. Marines and British civilian advisers are waging two wars in the hilly northern half of Helmand province: They’re fighting the Taliban, and they’re quarreling with each other.
The disagreements among the supposed allies are almost as frequent as firefights with insurgents. The Americans contend that the British forces they replaced this spring were too complacent in dealing with the Taliban. The British maintain that the Americans are too aggressive.
“They were here for four years,” one field-grade Marine officer huffed about the British military. “What did they do?”
“They’ve been in Musa Qala for four months,” a British civilian in Helmand said of the U.S. Marines. “The situation up there has gotten worse, not better.”
There are now about 20,000 U.S. troops in Helmand; the 10,000 British soldiers who once roamed all over the province are now consolidating their operations in a handful of districts.
To the south of Musa Qala, Marines are in the process of moving into Sangin district, where more than 100 British troops — nearly one-third of that country’s total war dead — were killed over the past four years.
“We’ve spilled a lot of blood in Sangin and Musa Qala, and we’re quite frankly happy to leave those places, but we don’t want this to look like another Basra,” said a British officer, referring to the southern Iraqi city that U.S. and Iraqi forces had to rescue after it was seized by militias upon a British pullout in 2007.
British forces rolled into Musa Qala in early 2006 after the Taliban killed the district chief, but the troops left later that year after striking a deal with the insurgents to not attack the town. The truce was short-lived, prompting the British, aided by the U.S. 82nd Airborne Division, to wrest control of the district center in late 2007.
President Hamid Karzai, with the agreement of the British, named a former Taliban commander as the new district governor to reintegrate insurgents into peaceful society. Marine officers said the commander, Mullah Salem, was corrupt.
When the Marines arrived in March, they deemed the status quo untenable. Within 48 hours, they punched beyond the northern front line and seized a town that had long been a Taliban stronghold.
Marine units now are targeting insurgents well beyond the old southern line. The Marines also leaned on the provincial governor to replace Mullah Salem, and they have sought to disarm his militia.
